As promised — here is the actual obituary for our cat Violet, with pictures.
Violet was the diva of our family. She was absolutely certain that the world revolved around her, and she veered between demanding our full and immediate attention, and ignoring us entirely. She would plonk down on our chest and smugly rest her paws on our throat; plonk down on our lap regardless of whether there was a laptop already there; weave in and out of our feet hysterically yowling for attention (usually in the morning when we were trying to leave for work — her instincts for bad timing were almost unerring). And then, fifteen minutes later, she would get up for no apparent reason, wander off, and ignore us for hours.
But that meant that, when she hung out with us, we knew that she really wanted to be there. When she plonked on our chest for ten minutes in the evening and then settled in at our feet for the night; when she burrowed under the covers in the morning and snuggled into the crook of my arm; when she spent an evening switching back and forth between my lap and Ingrid’s, resting her chin on an arm or a thigh with that smug, trusting, blissed-out look… we knew that she liked us, at least a little bit. That’s always been one of the things I like best about cats — you never have to worry about whether they’re putting up with you just to be polite.
And Violet was a very classic cat. In fact, we used to joke about how Violet had the standard issue cat personality: affectionate, snooty, self-possessed, unpredictable. But she was, of course, also very much her own cat, with her own quirks: her fascination with fast-moving light (she would chase the reflection off a watch face for hours), her uncanny ability to come up with brand new ways to annoy us in the morning, her weird thing about licking photographs and plastic, her ridiculously loud purr that could actually wake us out of a sound sleep, her life and death struggles with the yoga mat.
Violet was also an exceptional beauty. Her stylish black and white markings, her pink nose with the little black dot, her unsettling eye coloring with one green and one blue… I know that every cat owner thinks their cat is the prettiest, but Violet really was quite striking, and visitors always made a fuss over her. We used to say that she knew what a beauty she was, and while of course that’s silly, she did seem to know which poses got the best reactions out of us. (The crossed paws; the tuck and roll; the paw over the nose; the aforementioned stretched-out chin resting on a now-paralyzed human body part.) She was hard to photograph — the black fur tended to just disappear into the camera unless the lighting was just right, and the different colored eyes were hard to catch — but the good photos we did get are very distinctive. And I think they capture her diva essence.
We miss her.
Pictures below the jump. Continue reading “Violet” →
